Active Rain for Dummies: Where to go to be in the Know.
Oh My God. I think I've hit the proverbial real estate pay dirt when I discovered Active Rain. Oh my God. This is great. It's absolutlely fabulous. But wait, now that I've found it, what do I do with it? Where do I go from here? Do I just read and learn? Dare I write a post of my own? What? What? What?
I'll bet the above is reminiscent of the vast majority of us when we stumbled upon Active Rain. But fortunately for the Newbies, the vets and semi-vets such as myself, take pride in reaching out to help you to find and navigate your way around this cyber city called Active Rain.
Below are just a few resources where you can find
- the help that you need
- the answer to your questions
- some people you can call on at any time
The absolute first place to look is the Guidelines set by ActiveRain. This is very important as it sets the stage for expectations (yours, ActiveRain's and the membership at large). You'll want to know what is and is not acceptable "In the Rain".
Still got questions? Turn to Active Rain's Help/FAQ. Here you'll find out how to get started on Active Rain and find helpful tips contributed by ActiveRain members.
Then there are those of us that serve as ActiveRain Ambassadors. As an Active Rain Ambassador myself, I have accepted a responsibility to make myself available to newbies (and oldbies too. SIDE NOTE: OLDBIES IS NOT REALLY A WORD!) to answer questions that are "all things Active Rain." That doesn't mean that we Ambassadors know all of the answers, but even if we don't know an answer, we probably know where to get it or who can best address your question. So if you are new to Active Rain, please do not hesitate to ask any one of us that proudly wears the Ambassador badge under our profile picture. We have already accepted our role and you should by all means, take advantage of that. So be sure to look for that badge as you get to know the membership. But let me just say that Ambassadors are the only ones willing to help. I'm willing to bet that you can call on just about any member and get the same kind of help (thanks to Eric Michael for this reminder)Get yourself a mentor. Dick Greenberg came up with this awesome contest a few months ago and it was such a great idea, that the concept this lingers on. The first thing you'll need to do is go to the Sensei/Grasshopper page and read about how to find a mentor, then join the Sensei/Grasshopper Group. Once you join the group, you just place a post asking for a mentor to help you with a general or specific task. It's just that simple.
Groups created just for you. Because of the membership's helpful nature, several people have started groups just for you. The cool thing about this group, is that it reflects the challenges that the group's creator also faced when they were new to Active Rain. And each time someone writes a post that they feel will be helpful to Newbies, they will include the post in one of the following groups, so please go ahead and join these groups: Active Rain Newbies (founded by Karen Hurst in 2006), Introducing Newbies to Active Rain (founded by Jerry Newmann in 2011 when he was pretty much a Newbie himself and now he's one among AR's most respected members). Although these groups are specifically for newbies, I suggest that you check out other groups as well. I'm positive that there is a group just for you. As a matter of fact, there are many that you can and should join, if for no other reason than to start mingling and let people know that you exist among us.
Oh and last but not least. Actually this probably should have been first, but the last group that I want to mention is ActiveSEO. Why ActiveSEO? Because SEO is why we're really here. What's SEO you say? Well that stands for Search Engine Optimization which is a really fancy term for "using the best terms in your blog post to make it easy for people to find you. Don't take my word for it. Nobody defines it better than Google.
This should be just enough to get you started and take away some of the mystery.
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